Diana Donlon

Director, Soil Centric

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Diana Donlon is a soil and climate advocate. As the director for SoilCentric, a new for-purpose organization designed to accelerate engagement in regenerative agriculture, Donlon explores untapped avenues for immediate climate action.

Donlon was the director and founder of Soil Solutions at the Center for Food Safety from 2013 through April 2018, where she helped empower the public to make the critical connections between food and climate. Her recent short film, Soil Solutions to ClimateProblems, narrated by Michael Pollan, was screened at COP21 by the French Ministry of Agriculture. Available in four languages, the piece created an aesthetic that has been widely emulated and incorporated into two feature-length films.

Donlon has a bachelor’s degree in History from the University of California, Berkeley; a Master’s in Education from Harvard University and served two years in Peace Corps, Morocco.

“Hamburgers in a hot world,” is how host Greg Dalton summarized a recent Climate One discussion on cattle and their carbon hoofprint. The negative effects of the meat industry on our climate have been food for debate ever since the publication of the 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Association. But could there be a “grass-is-greener” side to this environmental fence?

The math is clear: lowering greenhouse gas emissions is not enough to keep the earth below 1.5 degrees Celsius of post-industrial warming. The latest science states that actively removing carbon from the atmosphere — storing it in rocks, soil, trees, and even turning it into products like concrete — is critical to restore the carbon and energy balance. To keep our planet from dangerous levels of warming, we’ll need to go carbon negative.